


On fatness in fic

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Meta Essays [1]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Meta, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:02:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: Thoughts on writing fat characters (particularly characters who are not fat within their canons).





	On fatness in fic

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [on tumblr](https://lbmisscharlie.tumblr.com/post/163546660056/on-fatness-in-fic) July 28, 2017.

Likely because my main fandoms – as with, you know, most of popular media – generally consist of characters who are both thin and beautiful or, if not beautiful, at least thin, I don’t see a lot of folks talking or writing about how to write fat characters in ways that aren’t dehumanizing in the same way I see a lot of good, thoughtful meta around race, gender, and sexuality on this here blue site. But I’d like to! 

Preface: I hard-closed out of an ostensibly happy fic today because it engaged in some casual fatphobia in ways I don’t think the author intended but that nonetheless served to dehumanize the character in question, absolve the character engaging in fatphobic behavior, and all-in-all treat fatness as something shameful. I don’t know if some of these issues were resolved later in the fic, because, as I said, hard-close even though I’d made it about halfway through. 

Preface the second: I’ve been fat all my life, but I’m still a smallfats with white middle class privilege. I’m not exactly writing here about my own experience as a fat woman, though, so much as my experience as a fat reader concerned with representation of lots of different kinds of fat people and bodies across the media I consume.

My unease isn’t exactly about that one fic. Because there are so few fat main characters in media in general, if we’re writing about fatness in fic it’s often taking a character who is thin and/or primarily muscular in canon and making them fat for some reason or another. I don’t, categorically, have a problem with this. But let’s maybe try to think a little more critically about the ways we do write fatness in fic?

If your character gains fat within the context of your story, or previously had less fat sometime before the story begins,* you should think about: 

a) why (you’re making this decision as a writer); 

b) what experiences and/or research you’re drawing on in your writing, just as you would for writing any other AU

c) why (this change happened to this character’s body); 

d) if c) actually accords to real medical science and a full picture of your character’s emotional life (i.e. yes, depression and trauma can lead to weight gain, and they can also lead to weight loss and many other physical symptoms that don’t change the mass of a body in appreciable ways); and 

e) how your character relates to their own body outside of how other characters see them. 

Yes, having a romantic or sexual partner express desire for our fat bodies can make us feel particular emotions about those fat bodies, but we live in these bodies all the time whether we’re being desired or not, fucked or not. We get to have our own vast (ha) interior lives, that are complex (i.e. not just self-hating) that might be informed by the way this incredibly fat-antagonistic world sees us, but are not solely determined by other people. How does your character feel about the physical space of their body? How do they feel about the life experiences they’ve lived in that body? If you’ve decided they have only shame or sadness around their body or the circumstances that brought about the current state of their body, maybe you should also think about if that’s a story that’s been told one.million.times. before or not, if that’s a story that plays into lazy and damaging tropes around fatness, if that’s a story that is simplistic and doesn’t allow your character the full depth of complexity they might deserve.

Finally, I am going to go on record as say can we please stop writing forced makeovers as “cute”? Could we maybe think about what the makeover trope says about agency and identity and self-fashioning and try to make it more complex? But if you’re going to have a makeover scene with your fat character, could we maybe not have the thin making-over friend not “realize” that there aren’t fat clothes available in “regular” shops rather than doing the modicum of research that a respectful, loving friend might actually do, or, hey, actually talking to their fat friend about where they can shop?

The thing is, with most fandom-centric media out there, if you’re writing a fat character, you’re making a deliberate choice to make that character fat. As with any other deliberate choice you make about your version of that character, you gotta do your homework. And as with any other change you make to a character that shifts their position of social privilege in this world, you’re also stepping into a whole different history of representation than that character might have canonically been a part of, and I would argue (ahem, clearly am) that it’s also your responsibility to know how your representation engages with that history.

*a, b, and e also all apply if you’re writing characters as always-fat when they aren’t in canon, and b and e if you’re writing characters that are fat in canon.


End file.
